Michael Jackson news and Twitter slowdown - a marketing question

[ahlexis]

It has been said in an earlier thread that:

So many people wanted to verify the early reports of Jackson's death that the computers running Google's news section interpreted the fusillade of "Michael Jackson" requests as an automated attack for about half an hour Thursday evening.

This makes an interesting point. What does it take to create the appearance of an automated attack and not truly be one?

At what point does a system considered "reliable" come undone by massive concurrent human interaction?

And what, as marketers, can we do about it if it is OUR server(s) that have that happen? I have heard that Google has TONS of servers. Yet it is also said that they started out in someone's garage like Hewlett Packard and many other companies did.

I'm not much of a techie when it comes to servers and whatnot, but are there any things that a marketer can do to make it easier to "scale up" their site quickly? Things that could be considered laying a proper foundation?